Assad

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Yom Kippur, but he won’t be asking for forgiveness. Instead, he will rail against the U.S. and Israel, perhaps repeat his call for the destruction of the Zionists and defend his country’s quest to develop its nuclear program, which he insists is peaceful.

No doubt a few delegates will walk out in protest, but otherwise the Iranian leader’s abhorrent behavior, in violation of the prohibition against incitement to genocide under the Genocide Convention, will go unchecked.

Remember Julian Assange, the guy behind WikiLeaks? Well, he’s back. Despite facing rape charges in his native country of Sweden, he’s started a new internet T.V. show, which Russia Today is hosting online. RT.com, a Kremlin-controlled station, may be a strange choice for Assange’s new show, given his quasi-anarchic ethos, but stranger still is his first interviewee—Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader.

The leaders of Iran and Syria have learned the dirty little secret of dealing with an international community making demands them.

In the case of Iran, the U.S. and other countries are about to launch another round of negotiations with Tehran in an effort to prevent the Islamic revolution leaders from developing a nuclear weapon that threatens the region and the free world.

E.U. foreign ministers are slapping new sanctions on the wife of Syrian President Bashar Assad, three other Assad family members, and eight Syrian government ministers, according to reports.

The new restrictions, which are slated to go into effect on Saturday, include a travel ban and the freezing of assets, The Associated Press reported. The wife of the Syrian president, Azma Assad, is a British native and holds British citizenship, which may mean she may still travel to England, AP said.

I was wrong. I was one of those who criticized the Obama administration for returning a US ambassador to Syria after a five-year absence without getting any clear pro-quid-pro from Bashar Assad. It would be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the Syrians as well as Assad's Iranian allies, I wrote at the time.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this urged Syrian President Bashar Assad to take “bold and decisive measures before it’s too late” and called on members of the world body to unite and take “coherent measures” with regard to Syria, the AP reported. The AP reported those were among Ban’s “strongest criticism yet of the Syrian government.”

After weeks of ratcheting up the criticism and pressure, President Obama has finally explicitly called for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to resign. He intensified sanctions on by freezing all assets of the regime under American jurisdiction and imposing other tough measures, but he ruled out “foreign intervention.”